The confusion of RSS begins with the acronym. Outside the blogger/tech world people don’t like to learn acronyms and automatically assume it is too complicated for them. I began using the word ‘subscribe’ next to my RSS tag to help guide my readers.

I might be missing something, but why have these buttons in the first place?

Just make sure your html has the code so rss readers can auto-detect the feed url, and let the browser do the rest (either by itself like Firefox’s feed icon, or by using and add-on toolbar like the Google toolbar which adds a “subscribe with your feed reader” icon to every site which has auto-detectable rss).